05/27/2011

Pro-entitlement, anti-government plebs

... a lot of people who went to tea-party rallies and voted Republican in the 2010 elections were fervently opposed to cuts to Medicare and Social Security. And it's not surprising that, as AEI's Henry Olson writes in National Review Online, those people seem to have played a particularly large role in defeating Republican candidate Jane Corwin in New York's historically Republican 26th district, and handing the district to Democrat Kathy Hochul. ...

... this particular type of systematic irrationality is a near-universal phenomenon in democratic publics. In most places in the world, working-class people who are basically socially conservative and distrustful of both government and big business tend to be fiercely protective of government-financed entitlement programmes that benefit them.

The future is screwed. As Heinlein predicted:

"For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome." — Robert A. Heinlein

Comments

... a lot of people who went to tea-party rallies and voted Republican in the 2010 elections were fervently opposed to cuts to Medicare and Social Security. And it's not surprising that, as AEI's Henry Olson writes in National Review Online, those people seem to have played a particularly large role in defeating Republican candidate Jane Corwin in New York's historically Republican 26th district, and handing the district to Democrat Kathy Hochul. ...

... this particular type of systematic irrationality is a near-universal phenomenon in democratic publics. In most places in the world, working-class people who are basically socially conservative and distrustful of both government and big business tend to be fiercely protective of government-financed entitlement programmes that benefit them.

The future is screwed. As Heinlein predicted:

"For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome." — Robert A. Heinlein